


Your Obedient Servant

by Island_of_Reil



Category: The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Genre: Innocence, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Masturbation, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, Religious Guilt, Shame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-27 02:39:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10799976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: How could a full-grown man, one who was sanctified unto Ulis and that only by the unmerited generosity of the Archprelate, even contemplate such an innocent, honorable youth as a tool for his debased, unholy desires?Judging by the steeliness of his cock, the answer seemed to be: quite easily.





	Your Obedient Servant

At this hour of the night, the silence of Ulis held throughout the rooming house. Other than a few drunkards who probably lingered at the Cloud Horses still, all boarders were asleep in their rooms, Thara thought. All but him.

He stared out the thin panes of the window at the foot of his narrow bed, the frost on them glowing in the penumbra of the streetlights. Atop his two threadbare blankets lay his spread-out airman’s coat; he tried to wind all three more tightly about his body. He’d thought his shabby rooms at Court had been drafty. In sooth, compared with this one, they had been as mild as Solunee-over-the-water.

It was his seventh night in Amalo, after his fifth day of work for the Amal-Athamareise Airship Company. The first two days had left him utterly exhausted, unaccustomed as he was to sustained physical labor. The last three had been kinder, as on the morning of the third he’d been accepted onto a refitting crew. Refitters were valued not for their brawn but for their nimble hands, and crew members with small hands and small frames were especially valued because they could make repairs in the tightest of spaces.

It was, he reflected now, not unpleasant to be valued once again. To be greeted with friendly smiles and waves, not eyes that narrowed and mouths that twisted.

On the floor of the hangar, he had silently thanked Ulis more than once for his education and his erstwhile benefice. Having been trained to minister to people in all walks of life, then having spent more than a decade doing so, had made it far easier for him to steer conversations with his crewmates in the directions he wanted. They were not people he necessarily would have befriended, had he come to Amalo in other circumstances. But by and large they were good people: honest, industrious, amicable, kind. Far better than the average courtier, in sooth. Even if many of them were sadly deceived in philosophical matters.

And not a few of the men were comely, too.

Thara bit his lower lip. Assignations had been the furthest thing from his mind when he flew to Amalo. He had had little appetite of any sort since he had relinquished his benefice: appetite was, after all, at the root of his downfall. Since he had earned, for reasons he could not fathom, the unjudging trust of His Serenity, he had clung to that trust as if to the edge of a precipice, and, oh, he longed to validate it. And, too, how in good conscience could any Witness for the Dead have spared a thought for the pleasures of the flesh when the blood of Edrehasivar’s kinsmen and of the _Wisdom of Choharo_ ’s crew cried out for justice?

Yet the unraveling of what had happened in Amalo would take time and patience, and the cultivation of his fellows’ trust. He had begun to till that ground quite well, impressing his crewmates with his competence, his diligence, his helpfulness, and what seemed to be little more than polite inquiries into their health and houses and states of mind.

He was certain it was not just these things that impressed a few of them.

The eyes of three different men, he noticed, would linger on him slightly longer than they did on most other men, certainly longer than on women. The most handsome of them had, more than once, smiled at him as if Thara had hung Ulis in the sky himself. Another, who did not speak often and then only in a very soft voice, had a tendency to drop his eyes and stammer when Thara approached. The third, much less charmingly, would lick his lips and occasionally stare.

Though the attentions were flattering, they also brought back painful flashes of memory. His days in the novitiate and the canoncy had been full of such stifled longings, his own or those of others for him, whether or not he reciprocated the latter. And, later, as curate and prelate, at various times he had tried to reassure a male congregant by laying his hand on the man’s sleeve or hand — and both of them had drawn back, startled, as an unexpected anbaric charge crackled between them. With only one exception, each time they had both hastily retreated into proprietous formality, and Thara had never again attempted such intimacy in the service of the man’s pastoral care.

The exception had been Evru, and … the less Thara thought about Evru, the better.

But the men in Amalo were a different matter. They were not sanctified. They had sworn no oaths, other than perhaps to fellow Curneisei. Thara had no authority over them, and he owed them naught outside the hangar. The smiling fellow and the shy one were young and unwed. (The lip-licker had a wife, but she was entirely welcome to him.) And, though Thara had heard a few men speak the name of the White-Tailed Swift — a marnis tavern at the edge of the Airmen’s Quarter — with a sneer, overall there seemed to be little prurient interest in how one’s crewmates spent their free time.

He thought now of the shy one, Kether, a very young man of mixed blood. Though he did not turn heads as the smiler did, neither was he unpleasant to look upon. His skin was a medium silver-grey, his outthrust jaw was sharp in its outline, and his golden eyes were wide and not protrusive. He was on the tall side, slender, with long and tapering fingers; he wore not little hoops in his ears, as many men did, but a silver clip fashioned like a suncat on the edge of his right ear. The one time Thara had remarked upon it in a complimentary spirit, Kether’s cheeks had darkened, and with a stammered thanks he had seized upon the first clumsy excuse he could to flee.

Thara wondered, now, if Kether’s face darkened in the same way with desire, and whether his eyes would darken too. He felt a throb in his heretofore quiescent cock — and a stab of guilt in his belly.

 _He is nineteen, perhaps not even that, and patently inexperienced. I am at least fifteen years his elder, I have been well taught how to lead and persuade others with words, and I remain consecrated — even though I have_ de _secrated my house and my calling alike. Am I so vile, that I shall imagine myself corrupting this awkward innocent, just to slake my lust?_

From how his cock began to swell at this self-castigating thought, yes, apparently he was.

Thara closed his eyes. He was not truly harming Kether, was he, by such imaginings? So often he had stroked himself to thoughts of the novice who had slept two beds down from him in the dormitory, or a fellow Witness whose very hands upon a corpse’s face had perversely stirred Thara’s loins, or any number of congregants who had likely thought of him as no more than their cleric. No harm had come from any of it. Harm had come only when he had given in to his yearnings, when he had let Evru Dalar enclose Thara’s hand in his and murmur, _Needst not long in loneliness, pretty prelate. Let me hold thee, let me kiss thee, let me please thee. No one else need ever know._

And pleasuring oneself to thoughts of an adulterer and wife-murderer was, surely, far worse than pleasuring oneself to thoughts of a timid, soft-eyed young crewmate.

Thara, pushing self-recrimination aside, found the buttons of his night shirt and began to undo them. His nipples had been stiff with cold since he had returned to his room, even under coat and blankets, but now they ached sharply with the need to be touched as well. Touch them he did, chafing them gently between his fingertips, stroking the crowns until he could feel a tightening in his loins to answer that in his nipples.

Kether’s nipples would be dark red, he thought, remembering watching out of the corner of his eye as the goblin novices in his dormitory dressed or undressed. Tiny garnets, centered within broad circles of carnelian. Would touching them bring him pleasure? Did Kether even know there could be pleasure in such a touch for a man? Would his ears tremble as Thara caressed him? Would his eyes close, his black lashes fanning out against his silver cheeks, or would they roll back in his head?

Thara’s breathing began to quicken. Kether’s hair was just long enough to be in need of recropping, and a lock of it often tumbled into his eyes. Thara pictured it doing so as Kether tilted his head back, parting his lips. _Dost like that?_ he imagined whispering as in fantasy his fingers tightened upon Kether’s nipples, in real life upon his own. Kether would reply not with words but with a soft moan, his grey hand covering Thara’s pale one as if to still it, but doing no more than lying upon it. His entire body would jolt with an erotic pang, as Thara’s did now as he scraped the edge of one short nail against his own nipple, and Kether’s pale-silver eyes would open wide —

Pale-silver? Kether’s eyes were gold, not silver. The color of amber, or honey. They would open wide as Thara’s fingers tightened on his nipples, and so would the boy’s long legs without his realizing it, his hips beginning to rise up from where he lay. Thara would slide one hand down Kether’s ribcage, rest it upon his quivering flat belly, whisper, _Where want’st me to touch thee, Kether?_ And Kether, overcome with both desire and modesty, would throw his arm over his own darkened face, his long, luxurious black curls spilling over his arm —

— no, Kether’s hair was no longer than his shoulders, now. The stray lock would tumble into his eyes, and other strands of it would stick to the fresh perspiration on his slate-grey forehead —

_— no — wait —_

Thara caught his breath in realization, then could barely take the next breath, gripped as he was within the twin vises of exquisitely painful excitement and suffocating shame.

When he had first been summoned to attend upon the new emperor, he had not expected much. Little as he had come to value Csoru’s opinions, it was clear from all he had heard that the young archduke had never in any way been prepared to take the throne. When he had first seen the new emperor, he had not been very surprised: Varenechibel Zhas’s bones and eyes under Chenelo Zhasan’s skin. A beautiful youth, to be sure. But nobility and royalty had always tended to be well-favored, and Thara had never shared the widespread elvish distaste for the looks of the Barizheisei.

It was the man behind the bones, behind the eyes, who seemed to have unwittingly insinuated his way under Thara’s skin, Thara not even aware of it until now. So young and untried, so much justification for bitterness, so much power in his hands… yet he would have let Thara refuse to Witness for his dead. He had stood by the mangled bodies of his kinsmen, ill as the sight of them had made him, while Thara spoke to them. He sought the truth, no matter what pain it might bring him, not for himself or even for his dead but for his people. He had _apologized_ to Thara for having dressed him down — would his father have done so? Would any emperor or empress have? And, in seeking the reason for Thara’s dishonesty, again he had not commanded but asked simply and humbly: _Wouldst thou tell me?_

And Thara had told him, and Edrehasivar had not flinched from it. Had not deemed him a foul excrescence of perversion, had not ordered him from his sight.

No doubt it was no more than compassion, as Edrehasivar had said to him in exasperation a moment before. That, and perhaps the emperor’s own naïveté. Growing up out on the very edge of civilization, he likely would not have encountered many marnei, at least those who would have been overt about their nature.

But … could it have been something more? Was the young emperor’s compassion for one such as Thara grounded not only in the losses he had suffered, the isolation and rejection he had endured, but in the knowledge that he, too, was constrained from acting on shameful desires? And not simply because they offended the gods, but because, attended night and day as he would be all his life, he could never indulge them unseen — and, were he discovered, he would at best be discredited and rendered ineffectual, at worst driven from the throne?

Thara breathed in the cold, stale air about him deeply. If he had had to placate his conscience before imagining Kether whimpering and squirming at his touch, how much more propitiation would it need were he to imagine His Serenity in Kether’s stead? The emperor was, at not even nineteen, a far better man than Thara was at thirty-three, having suffered far more than Thara — and Thara’s suffering was entirely his own doing. And what did Edrehasivar actually know of how marnei sported with one another? From what Csoru had said, he’d had only his disagreeable Nelada kinsman as a tutor while in relegation; had the man even bothered to explain to his ward how men coupled with women, how michen were begotten?

How could a full-grown man, one who was sanctified unto Ulis and that only by the unmerited generosity of the Archprelate, even contemplate such an innocent, honorable youth as a tool for his debased, unholy desires?

Judging by the steeliness of his cock, the answer, once again, seemed to be: quite easily.

Thara closed his eyes. It was despicable of him, he knew, to picture Edrehasivar on that hypothetical bed where Kether had shortly before lain. Naked, hair unpinned, ears unadorned. The inky, glossy clouds of his curls amassed behind his head, spilling over his stormcloud-grey shoulders, tangling as he writhed. Thara sucked in his breath at the image, and his hand stole into the waistband of his night trousers.

He would kneel astride him, he thought, as in his own bed his fingers sought and found the aching column of his cockstand and he hissed out his breath again. He would slowly stroke one tiny claret nipple between the fingertips of his left hand, pressing slightly harder, watching all remaining composure flee Edrehasivar’s expression. His right hand would be smoothing slow circles into the emperor’s shaking belly. He would hold that lust-dilated silver gaze, and he would murmur, _Where want’st me to touch thee…_

His voice would drop even lower, even softer.

_…Maia?_

Edrehasivar — Maia — would gasp, to be called as surely almost no one called him anymore, to have the stiff, formal name of his imperial authority stripped from him as Thara would have already stripped him of his jewelry, his court slippers and stockings, his quilted jacket, his fine trousers, his silk shirt, his undergarments, even the exquisite tashin sticks that concealed the full beauty of his hair. The blood surged almost painfully into Thara’s cock as he pictured his emperor laid out before him, bare in every sense, hips rising of their own accord from the bed.

Maia’s cock, Thara thought, would be as unbearably hard as his own was now, shaded indigo with the blood that engorged it. Its dripping head would bump against the back of Thara’s circling hand, leaving a streak of clear seed upon it. But Thara would not move to touch it, not yet. _Wilt not tell me what want’st me to do, Maia? I would do naught that would displease or discomfit thee._ The teasing note in his voice would belie the solicitousness of his words.

_Thara… please… touch me…_

_But I_ am _touching thee, Maia. Here_ — with a squeeze of the imprisoned nipple — _and here_ — with a light, tickling stroke over his belly. _Does it not please thee?_

Maia would groan, fling his arm over his face as Kether would have done, mortified yet inflamed that Thara would make him actually speak the word: _Thara… please. My cock. Touch my cock before I expire of want._

 _I am your obedient servant, Serenity_ — and Thara’s hand would encircle it, white upon indigo, and Maia would make the first of many incoherent noises. His coherence would ever diminish as Thara learned what pleased him most. To have the vein on the underside traced with a light fingertip; to have the ball of a thumb spread the clear seed over the breadth of the silky-soft head; to have a thumbnail gently play at the little ridge beneath it.

And then for Thara’s tongue to retrace the paths his fingers had taken. Thara imagined the weight of Maia’s cock in his mouth, could taste the slippery, salty clear seed and feel it drip copiously down the back of his throat. How Maia would cry out loudly now and call the gods by their names, gripping the sheets in his fists, barely keeping himself from thrashing with the overwhelming sensation of being surrounded by Thara’s hot, wet, skillful mouth and throat.

Would Maia want… 

Thara groaned, and not entirely in lust. To imagine himself servicing the emperor as might a whore was a wretched enough thing, testament to how low he had sunk. But to imagine the emperor servicing _him,_ receiving him as might a woman… the Ethuverid Zhas, the man whose seed would continue the Drazhada line, the receptacle of Thara’s seed instead…

From the way his belly and stones were tightening, he knew he would not now be able to contemplate at length how he would take his time lovingly, gently attending to what Maia undoubtedly considered the most shameful part of his body. That tiny, virginal whorl of dark flesh that would close up tightly at the first stroke of Thara’s finger, then slowly, slowly flutter open to him, admit his questing fingers. Finding the little spot within Maia that, he would promise velvet-softly as Maia whined and bucked and twisted upon Thara’s hand, would afford him even more pleasure when stroked with a cockhead.

As his crisis drew upon him and his hand shuttled harder and harder up and down his own cock, he pushed the lascivious thoughts of preparing Maia to take it out of his mind. Instead he flashed upon a vision of long, dark legs, knees bent and heels far apart on the bed. The streaks of fire that Maia’s long, lacquered nails would leave upon Thara’s back, vivid welts that he would feel for days whenever he moved or lay down, as Thara fucked slowly and steadily and deeply into his well-oiled, well-fingered hole. How Maia would sob for breath and cry out beneath him, luxuriant loose curls stuck to his sweat-sheened face, which would be nearly as dark as his cock, which would jerk spasmodically and, as his body rose against Thara’s one last time, spurt forcefully between their bellies and chests —

Thara clamped his free hand tightly over his mouth as he, too, began to spend. His body shook for long, long seconds, his hips arching up as high as he had imagined Maia’s arching, his vision scorched white and his mind burnt blank. Though from long habit he had carefully cupped himself within his night trousers to contain his seed, there was so much more of it than usual; it overflowed his hand and stuck in his pubic hair. Panting and whimpering behind his other hand, he subsided back down to his bed, where he lay in a swoon as time passed unmarked. His heart continued to hammer, and despite the cold of the room his skin was moist.

He came back to himself with a nauseating awareness. In the degenerate midden that passed for his mind, he had just turned his own emperor — a man who had shown him more compassion than had anyone else since his disgrace, save the Archprelate — into his private harlot. The abject hope that Edrehasivar, too, might be marnis, or might like men as well as women, was naught more than yet another artifact of Thara’s depravity. How much compassion would Edrehasivar show him were he to know how Thara had imagined him? What decent man would want another to imagine him a writhing, moaning whore, eager past the point of dignity for that other man’s cock?

Bile in his throat, lead in his breast, Thara rose from his bed and shivered in the cold. Carefully he held his right hand within his night trousers, against his body. For once, he would not besmear everything he touched. He found a handkerchief and wiped every trace of seed from his hand and as much as he could from the inner fabric of the trousers. Then, teeth clenched, he threw it onto the embers in the hearth, seized the bellows, and stoked the flames. There he stood, watching them consume the soiled cloth, unable to draw their heat into his own flesh and bones. Nor did he seem to have any of his own to preserve under his coat and blankets when he returned to bed. He curled himself up like an insect, hands tucked beneath his head, and did not find sleep until he could feel wetness trickling down his cheek to seep between his fingers.


End file.
